The round was backed by big names including Nvidia, AMD and Autodesk.
Fei-Fei Li’s AI start-up World Labs has raised $1bn to advance spatial intelligence – effectively, generative AI “world models” capable of interacting with complex virtual worlds.
Last November, World Labs launched its first commercial product called Marble that generates 3D virtual worlds from image or text prompts.
With this new funding, the start-up wants to continue building AI models to “revolutionise storytelling, creativity, robotics [and] scientific discovery”.
The round was backed by big name investors including Nvidia; AMD; Fidelity Management and Research Company; Autodesk; Emerson Collective; and Sea.
The start-up did not disclose its post-funding valuation, however, reports from last month estimated it to end up at $5bn. Autodesk has invested $200m in World Labs as part of the round, and with the funding, has also taken an advisory role in the start-up.
“Autodesk has long helped people think spatially and solve real-world problems and, together, we share a clear purpose – building physical AI that augments human creativity and puts more powerful tools in the hands of designers, builders and creators,” Li said.
Li is often referred to as the ‘godmother of AI’, thanks to her groundbreaking work on ImageNet. Her start-up World Labs came out of stealth in 2024, and was valued at around $1bn after a $230m investment round that included Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia’s venture arm and Radical Ventures, where she is herself a scientific partner.
World Labs describes itself as a “spatial intelligence company, building frontier models that can perceive, generate, reason and interact with the 3D world”. It describes its AI products as “large world models”.
Li called AI a “civilisational technology” in an interview with Bloomberg late last year. “I believe spatial intelligence is as critical [as] – and complementary to – language intelligence,” she said.
The World Labs co-founder is a professor at the computer science department at Stanford University and has served as director of the university’s AI Lab. She is currently the co-director of the Stanford Human-Centered AI Institute and has previously served as the chief scientist at Google Cloud.
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Fei-Fei Li, 2024. Image: © Steve Jurvetson via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
